Identifying Deliberation in Social Movement Assemblies: Challenges of Comparative Participant Observation

Abstract

Contemporary social movements can serve as a critical case for the empirical study of deliberation. In countless face-to-face meetings activists often discuss long hours before a decision is reached. In this context, we try to analyse the conditions under which deliberation is successfully employed as a method of discursive conflict resolution. As we develop participant observation in a comparative approach we encounter three methodological challenges which this paper addresses. First, we look at some characteristics of the global justice movements, briefly addressing the different settings in which controversial discussions occur. Second, we give a rationale for applying a semi-standardised multi-level participant observation in order to allow the collection of comparable data by various researchers in several countries. Focusing on participant observation on the level of controversial discussions we thirdly conceptualise competitiveness, power, and asymmetry as three theoretical dimensions to identify eight different practices of discourse, one of them being deliberation. We are currently implementing this model for regular observations of group meetings on a local, national and European level. First results should be available in the near future.

Sincerity as Strategy: Green Movements and the Problem of Reconciling Deliberative and Instrumental Action

“…Della Porta 2005, p. 340, Medearis 2004), social movement scholars have so far not engaged with the idea of communicative action. They have used deliberative theory as a framework to explore decision-making procedures within movement organizations (Della Porta 2005, Haug andTeune 2008), to examine the 'deliberativeness' of the claims made by social movement activists (Öberg and Uba 2014), and to study the public sphere as an alternative target for movement action (Giugni 2008, Bosi andUba 2009). For social movement scholars, deliberation is a method of internal decision-making, a form for expressing grievances, a target for messaging, or a set of enabling and constraining conditions for accomplishing the movement's ends.…”

Warum treffen sich soziale Bewegungen?

“…Mit Deliberation ist auch ein Begriff benannt, unter dem ein Großteil der Bewegungsforschung zu den Treffen sozialer Bewegungen läuft. Die methodischen Herausforderungen bei der Erfassung von Deliberation sind ebenso Gegenstand wie die Identifizierung bestimmter Entscheidungsverfahren, vor allem Konsens (Haug & Teune 2008). Die Untersuchung der Deliberationspraktiken sozialer Bewegungen fiel vor allem mit dem wissenschaftlichen Interesse für die globalisierungskritische Bewegung zusammen (vgl.…”

Enacting a parallel world: Political protest against the transnational constellation

“…Furthermore, in their “experimental spaces” (Graeber, 2012: 32), protests invent and establish new forms of political opinion-formation and decision-making which contest those outside of these experimental counter-spaces. These include drawing lots to determine who is the next to speak, open access, direct participation, and consensus-based decision-making (also through online deliberative forums; Haug and Teune, 2008), different kinds of non-profit-seeking practices of economic integration, such as “commons-based peer production” (Benkler, 2006), social information processing and the establishment of independent media networks, such as Indymedia (Origgi, 2012). Although few of these practices went beyond their fugitive and precarious status, they are, nevertheless, perfect democratic exercises.…”